


That's How the Light Gets In

by hauntedjaeger (saellys)



Series: Heroes in the Sky [5]
Category: Firefly, Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Canon Disabled Character, Cisgender Characters, F/M, Implied Newmannessa, Multi, Origin Story, Staggered Timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-28
Updated: 2014-03-28
Packaged: 2018-01-17 08:19:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1380619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saellys/pseuds/hauntedjaeger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Where you from, darlin’?” Nandi sort of looks like she’s smiling and sort of looks like she sees right through Nessa.</p><p>“Dyton. But I en’t seen the place since I was young.”</p><p>Now Nandi’s certainly smiling. “Bet it seems like a long time ago, looking back from the ripe old age of…”</p><p>“Thirteen,” Nessa lies. She’s tall.</p>
            </blockquote>





	That's How the Light Gets In

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MayQueen517](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MayQueen517/gifts).



> This is a story of _Pacific Rim_ characters in the _Firefly_ universe. The title is from Leonard Cohen's "Anthem," a Hermann and Vanessa song if ever there was one.

Control is the first lesson, and the last. At the Madrassa, Vanessa is sanded to blankness and polished to a shine. Years of discipline and preparation before the act is even mentioned.

When she walks into Nandi’s place, Nessa doesn’t have any kind of control.

“Work’s dried up,” she tells the madam, chin high, acutely conscious of her beanpole self in dusty trousers, sitting before this lady with silken hair and beaded clothes and red lips in a room that smells like ripe peaches. “My Da’s broke. I figure it’ll be better for him without another mouth to feed.”

Maybe someday she’ll make enough to give him some money, enough that he won’t have to chase the harvest around the continent. For now she’s half grown, and she knows enough to know that men like women who look like women, so to start with she probably won’t be anyone’s first choice, won’t impress anyone, but in the meantime she can scrub floors and wash sheets and cook, she’ll do what she needs to do until--

“Where you from, darlin’?” Nandi sort of looks like she’s smiling and sort of looks like she sees right through Nessa.

“Dyton. But I en’t seen the place since I was young.”

Now Nandi’s certainly smiling. “Bet it seems like a long time ago, looking back from the ripe old age of…”

“Thirteen,” Nessa lies. She’s tall.

Miss Nandi looks down for a minute. “You want a place here, we’ll make you one,” she says at last. “But if you’re of a mind to gamble, well, I have a feeling your odds would be good.”

Nessa has no idea what that means. She watches Miss Nandi go to a little terminal and send a wave, which is answered immediately by someone whose accent sounds like Nessa’s, but with all the rough edges gone. No, they say, it’s not possible. By the time she arrives they’ll be through the first day of screening.

Nandi says she’ll vouch for her through the second day. Says she’s got a spark. When they see her, they’ll know.

It’s no good. Not on Sihnon, anyway. Try Ariel, they say.

So that’s what she does.

* * *

 

Buying out a Companion’s contract is a month-long process. It involves auditing a client well beyond the initial prospective bid, for the safety of the Companion, the Guild explains.

Vanessa convinces the Companion house on Osiris to shorten it to five days. There’s precedent for expedited culmination, with clients whose profiles are particularly distinguished, and who could claim otherwise about Doctor Gottlieb?

There are very few questions for Vanessa, and they are pragmatic. They certainly don’t ask her if she loves him.

When the sum is calculated, the dividends the Guild would have made from Vanessa’s full and fruitful career, Hermann transfers the credits without blinking. He probably totaled it in advance. He probably overestimated.

The next day, Hermann withdraws what remains of his savings in platinum. It’s barely enough to hire the _Chernabog_. Vanessa, however, has three separate reserves of hard coin in her bag: the entire payment, less the Guild’s share, from her first client; the same from her second; and most of what she earned from the five times Hermann submitted a bid. All of it is hers, free and clear. Her debts were included in the buyout.

“You don’t have to do this,” he reminds her one last time, just in case, as they walk up the ramp of the Kaidanovskys’ ship.

“I know,” she tells him, again.

Buying out a Companion’s contract is not a claim. Technically, he didn’t do her any favors--now she’s not even licensed, can’t get work through the registry. All they’ve done is ensure that they’re above board, and that only one set of people might come after them. When she says that, he tells her it’s not funny. She’s not joking.

By the time they board the _Jaeger_ with a scanner-shielded cryo chamber, the money from Hermann’s bids is gone.

* * *

Control is every lesson. She practices, at the Companion house back on Osiris, with an initiate. Vanessa instructs him not to move or touch her, to tell her if she puts any pressure on his hips. Her thighs and core are strong from years of dance, but the first time she gives up after forty minutes, lays down and has the boy get on top of her and use what he’s learned to bring them both over. Vanessa doesn’t bother to hide her sullenness, doesn’t listen to the boy apologize ever so meekly and assure her that it was good, she’s very good, certainly no client would be disappointed.

After four practice sessions, her endurance starts to improve. She places her fingertips gently over the boy’s breastbone, less for balance and more to imagine what Doctor Gottlieb’s skin would feel like. Cooler, she thinks.

By the time she has her first evening with Doctor Gottlieb, she can make the initiate come within ten minutes, or she can draw it out as long as she wants to.

On their second evening together, she sits closer to Hermann.

At the next practice session, she manages to bring herself over, and when she and the boy are somewhat recovered, she gets on top of him again, to make sure it wasn’t a fluke.

On their third evening together, as Hermann starts to stand, she puts her hand on his and says, “Won’t you stay?”

* * *

“If you get sick of the place,” Nandi tells her, fixing the hood of Vanessa’s cloak as the shuttle’s engine stirs the dust, “just come on back. You’re always welcome.”

* * *

It’s better with Hermann, because she doesn’t tell him not to touch her. She keeps her fingers lightly on his chest (warm, so warm), and his dry hands sweep over her shoulders and breasts, the length of her stomach, down to her hips and thighs and back up again, and a moment later he must be feeling particularly bold because he sits up and puts his lips and tongue and teeth to her throat, and the cadence Vanessa established is interrupted so she can catch her breath, and Hermann pauses.

The look in his eyes is one Vanessa has seen twice before. Veteran Companions have assured her it happens every time, every client, often in repeat sessions as well. Sometimes during the act, and sometimes during something comparatively mundane, like laughing at a client’s joke.

It’s doubt. It’s a crack in something seamless. _Is she humoring me?_

On the one hand, Companions have a reputation for professional detachment, which makes people illogically assume that they’re incapable of deriving pleasure from their work, and any indication otherwise is a masterly affectation. On the other, Companions have a reputation for being well dressed nymphomaniacs, and that’s even worse: if anything can send them into a fit of ecstasy, nothing the client does is actually that special.

For every client, the moment passes. Either they are persuaded of the Companion’s sincerity, or they cease caring and go back to enjoying the experience. No one has been able to tell Vanessa how to avoid the moment entirely.

Vanessa isn’t sure what’s on her face. She thinks it might look a little like fear, even though it isn’t, and that could be taken the wrong way too, if he chooses to take it ill. She gazes at Hermann and starts to move again, awkward at first in a position she hasn’t practiced, then she finds the right angle, keeps herself carefully balanced over him, and Hermann braces himself with his arms behind him and watches her, and after a while the look fades.

* * *

“I can give her a good life,” Hermann lies on the first day of culmination. “If she wishes to stay with me.”

He is in a straight-backed antique wood and leather chair, conspicuously higher than the Guild auditor and Vanessa, who sit with their legs folded atop cushions on the marble floor. They form an equilateral triangle. There is no paperwork, terminal, tablet, or visible recording device. When the auditor asks a question, Hermann or Vanessa answers as if the other is not present.

Out of the corner of her eye, she watches the fingers of his right hand twitch against the arm of the chair. The auditor can see it, too. Vanessa would put her hand over Hermann’s, but he’s just out of reach.

They don’t know, she tells herself, breathing through her nose. They can’t know.

The auditor keeps a careful, pleasant expression on their face as they turn to her. “Is that what you wish, Vanessa?”

* * *

Hermann touches her again, and soon Vanessa is gasping. She has never been one to act Companion-coy and call an orgasm anything but that, and the Buddha only knows she’s had her share of good ones. But this… this is a fall.

Sometimes a thing gets cracked, and what shows through is better than the blankness and the shine.

* * *

They’ve been on _Jaeger_ for a couple months, and the fifty head of cattle in the cargo bay are bound for a dust bowl Vanessa knows well. As the crew prepare for landing, Vanessa asks Captain Pentecost if she can borrow the Mule.

She tells Hermann he doesn’t have to go with her. He says he knows, and he gets in anyway. And that means Newt climbs onto the back bench just before Vanessa powers up the repulsors.

First, they ask around in town. No one’s heard of anybody named Alleyne. No one’s seen any migrant ranch hand matching his description.

It’s been eleven years, and Vanessa left in a hurry. She’s tried to find him before, after she took her second client and several times since, searching census records and ship’s logs, so she’s not surprised. Anything could have happened. Shootout, cholera, pressganged by Browncoats. Still, there must be some trace of disappointment on her face, because Newt puts his hand on her back as they take the Mule west to a ramshackle little bordello.

She tells a girl with a two-year-old boy clinging to her skirts that she’d like to speak with Nandi. “Nandi’s dead,” the girl says in a flat voice. “I’m Petaline. I run the place now.” She peers at Vanessa’s face. “I know you.”

Vanessa goes stiff. Behind her, Newt has been chatting up a pretty blonde with a speech impediment, but he looks up, ready to bolt if a whore in the middle of nowhere has Alliance ties.

Petaline only says, “You do right by her? Or are you looking for work?”

Now it’s Hermann who turns his head sharply. Vanessa puts her hand over his--Petaline didn’t mean it as an insult. The fact is, she has no idea whether Nandi would say Vanessa did right by her.

“I came to repay her for the good she did me.” From the inner pocket of her duster, she takes out a little package wrapped in silk. Most of her gowns have been sold, or cut down for swaddling cloths and a couple little skirts for Holiday Choi. What Vanessa wears now is cobbled together from what they could barter in half a dozen markets, altered around her belly, and it’s all the blacks and greys and browns of Rim spacer gear. This scrap of silk is from one of her favorites, purple shot through with gold thread.

Inside it is the platinum from her second client. “I expect there’s plenty around here that needs fixing,” she says as she offers it to Petaline.

“Most everything’s a little broke,” Petaline says, pocketing the bundle without looking at it.

That makes Vanessa’s mouth twist into a wry shape. “And this,” she says, holding out the second bundle, from her first client, “is for the next lost soul who comes along. You gonna do right by them, Petaline?”

She weighs it in her hand, looks Vanessa square in the eyes, and nods.

* * *

She tells the Guild auditor yes, and the Guild auditor looks at her for a long time, but Vanessa isn’t lying.

* * *

“I think our time is almost up,” Hermann says into the dark of Vanessa’s bedroom, the first words he’s spoken since she laid him down. Beads of sweat are cooling on his chest.

Clients try to make a graceful exit. Clients try to end it as soon as they remember the whole thing has been a service rendered. Clients get embarrassed.

Vanessa says, “How long do you want to stay, Hermann?”

He turns his head to stare at her.

* * *

“There but for the grace of God, huh?” Newt says as they climb into the Mule again.

“Newton,” Hermann hisses.

“Oh, I’m sorry, did I miss something?” Newt has to speak louder as Vanessa starts the engine. “Or was there a pretty good chance that you could have been stuck in a backwater brothel for the rest of your life, Vanessa? I’m just saying.”

Vanessa gives Hermann a soothing smile, then glances over her shoulder at Newt. “I don’t think I would have,” she tells him.

It’s not because she would have made it to the Madrassa some other way. It’s not because some rancher with a hundred head of cattle and a big mansion would have come and scooped her up to be his bride instead.

It’s because Vanessa has faith--strong as any shepherd’s, but not in any god. If Newt’s beloved multiverse theory is true, there isn’t a single ‘verse where she and Hermann aren’t together. There are probably precious few where Newt isn’t with them as well. Somehow, they would have found each other. She's certain of it.

Vanessa puts her hand over Hermann’s hand and keeps it there all the way back to _Jaeger_. 


End file.
